The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism (Ecocritical Theory and Practice)

The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism responds to a need to expand and refine the connections among nonhuman studies and American literary naturalism and to productively expand the scholarly discourse surrounding this vital movement in American literary history. This collection focuses on that which becomes visible when the human subject is skirted, or moved off-center: in other words, the representation of nonhuman animals and other vital or inert species, things, entities, cityscapes and seascapes, that play an important part in American literary naturalism. Informed by animal studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, new materialism, and other recent theoretical perspectives, the essays in this collection discuss early naturalist texts as well as more recent naturalistic-oriented authors. Cover Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Other Species The Outer Animals Jack London and the Perils of Human Exceptionalism The Social Contract and Human-Animal Equality in Dreiser’s‌‌‌‌ “McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers Extinction, Genocide, and Atomic Anxiety Land and Sea Environment, Emotion, and the Individual in “The Open Boat” Anthropomorphism Reconsidered “Love” of the Land as Agrilogistic Tragedy in O Pioneers! Cityscapes and Pseudonature Wharton’s Architectural Imagination in The House of Mirth Pseudonature in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth Naturalism’s Nonhuman Streets Image, Object, Text Between Word and Image “The Cruel Radiance of What Is” Last Things Trouble with Human-Nonhuman Distinctions in Dreiser, London, Hamilton, and Dick Davids and Goliaths Writing What Remains Index About the Contributors